How to Improve Your Brand Consistency With a DAM Platform

With a vision of an economic rebound, businesses are returning from the impacts of a life-changing pandemic to face lasting changes in the customer mindset and the way businesses are run. While brands are accelerating the transition to digital commerce, one thing is clear: making this turnaround entails both business consistency and innovation—consistency being the operative word. To create brand value, recognition, and trust in the minds of the customers, brands must focus on delivering consistency across all in-person and digital experiences. When these diverse customer touchpoints and marketing channels marry up to form a unified experience, it strengthens the essence of the brand, and a repeat customer is formed. It’s important to note that consistently presented brands enjoy 3.5 times more brand visibility in comparison to the ones with an inconsistent brand presentation. Evidently, consistent branding is instrumental in making a company easily recognizable and gaining an edge in a highly saturated marketplace. 

Enterprises must establish authentic measures, analyze the right data, and build programs to promote longer, more profitable customer bonds to deliver on the holy grail of branding — consistency! This is where digital asset management (DAM) can make all the difference. It allows marketers to reach new levels of efficiency and increase savings with data-driven content decisions. 

The end result is a unique, recognizable, and consistent brand experience across a complex map of touchpoints. And this is precisely what customers look for. That said, it’s imperative to understand how the modus operandi of a DAM system contributes to this consistency. 

Capturing Every Nuance of Brand Consistency with DAM

• Centralization of Digital Assets: At the core, a digital asset management system is an efficient tool that allows businesses to centralize, organize, distribute, access, and analyze their digital media assets like images, videos, PDFs, and more. This centralization requires stitching together multiple disconnected systems across an organization. It focuses on eliminating digital asset silos, syndicates the increasing volume of digital assets across diverse channels, and transforms individual assets into a standardized format for delivery in context. Centralized digital assets boost management, sharing, tracking, reporting, and security, whereby users remain up-to-date with any changes made to brand assets in the DAM system and brand guidelines. Beefed up with intuitive features, it helps users organize and find files easily, control access and usage rights, automate asset optimization and simplify file sharing.

• Seamless Collaboration and Communication: Digital asset management solutions essentially address the complexities in creating, quality assurance, publishing, and sharing digital assets. As more and more organizations are transitioning to a remote workforce, keeping different teams on the same page and updated on the current initiatives has never been more difficult. Digital assets are changing this narrative by improving collaboration and maintaining consistency and communication among marketing disciplines. The solution fosters integration with marketing technologies and can be embedded in the organization’s existing project management platform. This allows users to attach digital assets to different projects, maintain version control, make edits, approve content, and more. As a result, project management and brand communications across departments, subsidiaries, partners, and freelancers are made seamless and consistent – bringing in coordinated benefits of a single centralized system. 

• Consistent Information, Content, and Assets at Scale: With a DAM system, you can easily streamline storage, categorization, and management of digital information, content, and assets (documents, templates, images, audio and video files, and product-related data). This product-related metadata can be imported and configured using custom fields for cross-selling and up-selling, print, and online use. Bi-directional data relationships are formed among product, item, brand, asset, and more to drive agile decisions. Moreover, to boost brand consistency, brand guidelines are shared with all relevant stakeholders, enabling a clearer understanding of a brand’s assets. As and when requirements become more sophisticated and advanced, DAM systems enable brands to step up and execute their content marketing strategy at scale. 

• Faster Content Approval and Publishing: DAM ensures content approval workflow with the right management to maintain brand authenticity and transparency. The content approval workflow involves assigning deadlines for content review and approval. In order to safeguard their brand reputation, organizations can leverage DAM to enable access and usage permissions that allow users only access assets relevant to them, thereby mitigating the risk of unapproved content being published. This role-based security strengthens the control over assets and the way they can be accessed, edited, approved, or downloaded. Workflow connects the online proofing process to your digital asset management system. It’s flexible and easy to use, so you spend more time doing great work and less time sending emails.

• Deep Globalization and Localization: DAM specializes in creating a seamless, enterprise-wide experience for meeting both localization and globalization needs. Workflows within a DAM system power the lifecycle of a digital asset, which simplifies acquiring approvals for a marketing asset, wherein numerous countries, languages, and teams are involved. It replaces ad hoc processes — emails and text messages — with specific localization workflows and can further automate the approval processes to ensure that assets are created at scale. Approvals and QA processes for each location and language can be automated. Global scalability is made more navigable, and silos are dismantled across localizable areas of documents, conditions to apply, and validation workflow. Localization efforts go beyond just content to meet the complex needs of the working environment of a multi-site, international enterprise.

• The Power of Artificial Intelligence (AI): Not many technologies have been able to drastically transform and improve digital asset management capabilities and assent management outcomes like AI. Be it speech-to-text conversion, facial recognition, automatic asset tagging, or visual similarity, AI brings a plethora of digital capabilities to reinvent asset management . An AI-powered DAM significantly enhances the identification, tagging, and editing of assets for deeper context building and faster speed. Machine learning algorithms infused in it can help predict content needs and make recommendations to users. With such tasks being performed in near real-time, brands can gain a thorough understanding of their digital assets and their functioning and enable faster searching and handling of these assets. These benefits translate into a competitive edge for brands. 

The Conclusion

Customers trust what they recognize and thus want to buy from brands they know. Achieving and maintaining consistency is one of the key drivers of DAM adoption today. In conclusion, when it comes to brand consistency, the debate around digital asset management solution adoption is no more about “if or whether” but “when and how.”